For the academic year of 2006-07 I made Munich, Germany my home, taking part in the Junior Year in Munich program offered through Wayne State University.  Academically I split time attending courses at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität as well as at the Junior Year in Munich institution, but lived and played in the immense student accommodations known collectively as Studentenstadt.   Perhaps better known for its world-famous Oktoberfest celebration and difficult Bavarian dialect, Munich had both an overt and covert side, and as a student for one year I had the chance to discover both.

Festival time in Munich, capital of the German state Bavaria, may seem to epitomize all that the Bavarian culture wants to offer – a citizenry deeply attached to a seemingly unchanged culture, displaying proudly the attire of a Tracht, if you’re a guy, and a Dirndl for the women, a Weissbier to start your day off right, and just in case you’ve forgotten that you’re not just in Germany, but rather Bavaria, the Bavarian dialect – a foreign language in its own right.  But life in Studentenstadt, literally “student city,” exposed me to an entirely different student culture, one that at times appeared not at all what the Bavarian state so publicly portrayed.  Rather, it was a strong internationalism that seemed to rival the mood of a UN general assembly meeting.

Just as Bavaria may seem like a different country to someone trained in the lexicon and pronunciation of Hochdeutsch, or standard German, Studentenstadt was a certifiable city within a city.  Of the 35 or so other students living on my floor, roughly a quarter were from countries other than Germany.  A Bulgarian explaining the linguistic properties of the Russian language in German to a native English speaker, namely me, wasn’t easy to place!  So if I had looked forward to test my progress in the language by eavesdropping on a conversation on the U-Bahn only to have my hopes quickly dashed with the sound of unmistakable Bavarian, it was with the knowledge that after I corrected my French neighbor Marie’s English paper, Flo would instruct us both in the finer points of Bavarian at an Italian dinner night.  Studying abroad today hardly limits one to one’s country of choice.